Analysis of Three Complement-Taking Predicates in Spoken Turkish: bil, san, and zannet

ZEYREK BOZŞAHİN D.

Languages, vol.10, no.2, 2025 (ESCI) identifier identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Article
  • Volume: 10 Issue: 2
  • Publication Date: 2025
  • Doi Number: 10.3390/languages10020027
  • Journal Name: Languages
  • Journal Indexes: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, Directory of Open Access Journals
  • Keywords: bil, complement-taking predicates, san, Turkish, zannet
  • Middle East Technical University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

This paper presents a corpus-based synchronic investigation of three Turkish mental–cognitive verbs in the present tense: san ‘guess, believe’ and zannet ‘suppose, assume’ (in the first person) and bil ‘know’ (in the second person), in spoken discourse. These verbs, known as complement-taking predicates (CTPs), tend to appear without clausal complements in discourse and function as idiomatic units conveying epistemic modality. This paper characterizes the distribution of occurrences of the three predicates based on frequency to determine the extent to which usage frequency has led to routinization and greater autonomy for the CTPs under investigation, showing that the clause-medial variants deserve attention, as they clearly demonstrate the parenthetical behavior, autonomy, capacity to fulfill pragmatic functions, and projective force of foreshadowing new information of the predicates.